Crow Soil Ecology & Biogeochemistry Lab

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Jon Wells for his recognition as the NREM Best PhD Student Oral Presentation on “Differential effects of lignin chemistry on conversion”.  Jon wrote that ‘”Global interest in renewable fuels is rapidly growing as the need for local and sustainable energy increases. In Hawaiʻi, local energy growth and creating new energy sources, specifically liquid fuels, are of high priority.  To this end, the structural properties of 12 potential biomass feedstock grasses were investigated to facilitate feedstock crop choice for two bioenergy conversion pathways: 1) anaerobic digestion (AD), and 2) hot water pretreatment followed by enzyme hydrolysis (HWP).”  He concluded “Selecting more readily convertible crops, with favorable lignin chemistry, could lead to an improvement of conversion efficiency by 2-5% and may prove to be a simple and effective way to select and screen feedstocks to improve the outlook of bioenergy production in the state.”  Jon also presented this work last year at the 25th Annual EUBCE 2017 conference.